Never Enough Read online

  But before Smith could get too involved with thoughts on the value of his existence, The Cure figured that if the studio wasn’t working for them, they’d best get back out among the faithful. They returned to the road on October 3, revisiting the Stockholm venue, The Rockpalais, which had been the site of their last show with Hartley five weeks earlier. Over the next three weeks the new three-piece Cure bounced between Bremen, Munich, Amsterdam, Brussels, Bordeaux and Hamburg, working hard on consolidating their burgeoning European fanbase. This 27-date tour of Scandinavia, France, Germany and the Low Countries ended on October 31 at Rodange, where they played at The Blue Note. The band may have been fast running out of steam, but the tour achieved its purpose: almost every show was a full house, while Seventeen Seconds climbed into the Top 10 in Belgium and the Netherlands, where The Cure, a band still without anything resembling a definable look, found themselves in the company of such very image-savvy acts as Abba, Queen, The Stray Cats and Spandau Ballet. It was almost enough to distract them from the tricky task of making their third album.

  Back in the UK, The Cure decided to round off their most active year yet with a series of campus shows (and then only universities that were open to the public). It was smart positioning on the part of Parry: if the music press critics were having trouble with The Cure, then best focus on their Penguin Classics-reading fanbase. After all, who needs good press when people are buying your records? (As proved by ‘A Forest’, which had become an unlikely Top 40 hit in April.) And rather than hire the usual hopefuls as support acts, the band asked for demo tapes to be sent to them, in order to give a new band a shot in each town they visited. It all made perfect sense. To celebrate, The Cure planned an end-of-year party by hosting a Christmas show (the first of many), to be held at the Notre Dame Hall, just off London’s Leicester Square, on December 18. Also on the bill for this invitation-only affair were Cure peers the Banshees and The Associates, as well as The Scars and Tarzan 5.

  Although the night was soured by the death, 10 days earlier, of John Lennon, the only Beatle to survive punk with his legend intact, Smith and the band celebrated in typical Cure fashion: they got stupendously pissed. Freed up after a six-month stretch during which the band had played in 13 different countries, they had the perfect excuse to have a seriously big one. All Smith could recall of the night was that “we were all really loud on stage and there was a lot of screaming and a lot of drinking”. Echoing their one-off Cult Heroes set earlier in the year at The Marquee, The Cure saw out 1980 with a sloppy cover of a rock’n’roll chestnut, Gary Glitter’s ‘Do Ya Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)’.

  It had been a strange year for The Cure. They’d moved on from the mistakes of Three Imaginary Boys and released an album that was much truer to the sound that Robert Smith could hear playing inside his head. (Image, though, was still an issue – the Andrew Douglas photo on the cover of Seventeen Seconds was just as enigmatic as the household appliances shot of their debut.) They’d toured relentlessly and dabbled with life as a four-piece before settling once again as a trio. The band had also attempted the seemingly unthinkable by trying to cut two albums in a year, an attitude that would soon be absurd in a music world about to be overrun by marketing departments intent on squeezing every last breath of life out of each album they release. The memory of the aborted sessions at Morgan might have soured a remarkably lively year for The Cure, but Smith and the band knew that they couldn’t waste too much energy contemplating what they couldn’t change.

  As another year under Thatcher’s repressive regime dawned, Smith began to spend more and more time in the many churches of Crawley, and the theme of the band’s next album started to emerge. Previously Smith had vague plans for a record “of ideas”, but he now wanted to concentrate on faith – or the lack of it, in his case. Smith would take a notebook with him, scribbling away while the services continued in their solemn, austere fashion. Such sombre, hymn-like songs as the album’s title track and ‘The Funeral Party’ would be bold attempts on Smith’s part to capture the idea of religion and devotion on tape. While taking it all in, Smith was about to make a discovery that would put the fear of God in him – if he could only believe in the existence of a higher being, of course.

  “I’d think about death and I’d look at the people in the church and I knew that they were all there above all because they wanted ‘eternity’. I realised I had no faith at all and I was scared.”

  At the same time, Tolhurst’s mother Daphne, possibly his biggest supporter, had become gravely ill. Smith and his long-time musical and personal ally would spend hours locked in earnest conversation about the subject of death. The eventual passing of Tolhurst’s mother (on June 21, two months after Faith’s release) and the subsequent death of Smith’s grandmother would weigh very heavily on The Cure’s third album. “I think that marked a point for us starting an adult life,” Tolhurst said.

  As January rolled into February 1981, the plan for Faith was relatively straightforward: time had been booked at Morgan’s studio one, which had proved a touchstone for their sophomore album, between the 2nd and the 11th. While Seventeen Seconds might have been a surprisingly efficient recording process, done and dusted within a few weeks, Faith was a case of trial by studio. The sessions continued throughout February, as the band bounced between a variety of studios: Red Bus, Trident, the Roundhouse and the legendary Abbey Road. The problems that Smith was encountering with his lack of faith extended into the music-making process: recorded tracks were repeatedly scrapped and both the inner-band relationship, and the understanding between Smith and producer Mike Hedges, reached boiling point.

  Smith would unleash his anger on his bandmates and ever-present roadie Gary Biddles, especially when they were off getting wasted while Smith was trying to record his hushed, pensive vocals. As Smith would recall, the band had laid down the basic beds for the tracks in a “completely disinterested way, as if someone else was doing it and not us. [And] whenever I started to sing, the whole atmosphere went black.”

  The band’s recently discovered thing for cocaine wasn’t helping the album’s unproductive sessions, either. “I was taking a lot of coke during the making of that album,” Smith would confess in 2000, “and it was a very difficult and cranky atmosphere. Everything we did was wrong. I was permanently red-eyed and bitter and Faith didn’t turn out how I wanted it to at all. I remember finishing the vocals off at Abbey Road and just feeling incredibly empty.” The two impending deaths in the Tolhurst and Smith family, plus the gloomy legacy of Ian Curtis, which Smith just couldn’t seem to shake, only made the Faith sessions tougher. Lol Tolhurst cut to the chase when he explained to me that “I listen to Faith now and don’t think it’s as realised as Seventeen Seconds.”

  Chris Parry, meanwhile, had been allowed to attend these sessions, but didn’t enjoy what he was hearing. And, of course, the extra sessions, in increasingly slicker and higher-priced studios, were hitting the Fiction head where it really hurt: his bottom line. Parry would never disclose a figure, but did say that Faith “cost a lot more than it needed to”.

  While Parry worried about the mounting recording costs, the band was trying to prepare themselves for another reality – they were soon to start touring the same songs that had been so difficult to record. No wonder they were burying themselves under a pile of Colombia’s finest. Finally, by the end of February, their third LP was completed. It had tested a lot more than The Cure’s faith: it had been a bloody ordeal.

  If Seventeen Seconds had been one long, sustained downer, a 10-track meditation on misery, then Faith sank even further into Smith’s spiritual abyss. During the album’s slow-burning opener, ‘The Holy Hour’, Smith’s voice is again buried in the mix, a spectral presence in a turgid sludge of effects-heavy guitar and plodding bass and drums. And this was the same band that delivered such a melodic, immediate, Sixties-flavoured strum as ‘Boys Don’t Cry’! ‘The Holy Hour’ had started to take shape in Smith’s imagination as he sat through Catholic Mass a
t Crawley’s Friary Church one Sunday night; much of the album was written from Smith’s attempts to unravel the enigma that was the Catholic faith, an ongoing presence during his upbringing. Smith was spellbound by the faithful (although he didn’t count himself among their number), as they responded to the catechism. ‘The Holy Hour’ was one of several Faith tracks road-tested before it was committed to disc by the three moodists of Sussex. By the time of its recording, it had been fine-tuned to such a degree that there was absolutely no flab on the track. Nor was there the slightest suggestion of joy. The tone of Faith had been well and truly established.

  ‘The Holy Hour’ was followed by ‘Primary’, a natural successor to ‘A Forest’. Powered by the dual basses of Smith and Gallup, another of Tolhurst’s steady-handed, bare-boned drum patterns and Smith’s lost-in-a-wind-tunnel rhythm guitar, ‘Primary’ was an urgent, precisely crafted mood piece, every bit as evocative as ‘A Forest’. Smith spits out the elliptical lyrics – which he would admit were inspired by the notion of dying very young, “innocent and dreaming” – as though they’ve left a poisonous taste in his mouth. The next track, ‘Other Voices’, was dominated by Gallup’s thudding, insistent bassline before Smith unleashed a war cry that wouldn’t have been rejected by Hiawatha himself. There’s much talk of “empty rooms” and “distant noises/ other voices” during ‘Other Voices’, a track whose key inspiration had been drawn from one of Truman Capote’s precise studies of Southern Gothic, Other Voices, Other Rooms. While it wasn’t essential that Smith’s wordplay made any kind of literal sense – the guy was no Truman Capote, after all – his lyrics seemed perfectly matched to the epic sense of doom and gloom that hung over Faith like a dark cloud. Just like ‘A Forest’ on Seventeen Seconds, ‘Other Voices’ had the feel of a mantra: it seemed as though the track could continue forever, snaking its way into the deep-black night.

  The following track, ‘All Cats Are Grey’, did nothing to alleviate the all-consuming sense of despair – in fact, if anything, the five-and-a-half-minute Goth rock hymn tightened the noose just that little bit more. As with ‘Other Voices’ (and ‘Killing An Arab’, ‘M’ and ‘At Night’ previously), the track drew from a literary source: this time around it was Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Gothic novels published between 1946 and 1959 that could be read as an allegorical study of post-war Britain. These novels are so revered that they’ve been compared with the prose of Charles Dickens and J.R.R. Tolkien. Interestingly, the three books, Gormenghast, Titus Alone and Titus Groan, don’t go anywhere in a hurry, not unlike The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds and Faith. As one literary critic noted, “Peake’s command of language and unique style set the tone and shape of an intricate, slow-moving world of ritual and stasis.” Sound familiar?*

  ‘All Cats Are Grey’ unwound slowly, Smith’s graveyard vocal held back until the track was almost at its midway point; by that time, the band had hooked remorselessly into one seriously bitter groove. More than anywhere else on Faith, or Seventeen Seconds before it, Smith sang with the solemn conviction of someone who’d caught a glimpse of humanity’s true heart of darkness and didn’t fancy what he’d seen. Just like ‘A Forest’ before it, the track was Smith’s attempt to capture a recurring nightmare he’d been suffering, in which he repeatedly found himself lost in a series of caves, unable to find any way to escape. Scary stuff.

  Joy Division’s Still, reviewed by NME six months after Faith, may have been celebrated as a record that “confronted … and discovered the causes of the current depression [and found it] to be rooted in spiritual rather than material impoverishment”, but Smith seemed even deeper in the bottomless pit of despair than the doomed Curtis. (Although The Cure lacked a eulogy with quite the same grace of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.) ‘The Funeral Party’ took Smith’s obsession to its naturally bleak conclusion, a monumental wall of keyboards draped over the track like a black shroud, as Smith wailed and moaned and thrashed about like some poor unfortunate struggling to find a way to deal with his demons. The song was lifeless, tuneless, a good old-fashioned plod, yet strangely seductive and listenable at the same time. (Smith would state, later on, that he’d stretched the song’s theme of death to include a consideration of his parents’ eventual death and, naturally enough, his own demise.) At this mid-point of the album the question lingered: how much lower could The Cure go?

  ‘Doubt’ answered that question with a crisp, relatively clean strum of Smith’s guitar and a tempo that suggested there was some life left in The Cure just yet. It’s no less a bitter, angry rant than what preceded it, as Smith spilled what he would describe as “the anger and frustration at the pointlessness of everything”; it’s just that the band had virtually ground to a halt with ‘The Funeral Party’ and obviously decided to pick up the pace a beat or two with ‘Doubt’. But the overwhelming sense of bleakness returns with ‘The Drowning Man’, another slowly uncoiling, downbeat mantra of misery, a song that also mourned the death of innocence and what Smith referred to as “blind love”. If cocaine was the drug that launched a million all-nighters, it clearly had the reverse effect on The Cure – it seemed as though the Bolivian marching powder that he’d been hoovering throughout the sessions only helped Smith tap into the pessimistic side of his nature. ‘The Drowning Man’ typified that.

  The Cure’s third album closed with the title cut, ‘Faith’, a track that stretched Smith’s morbid mood by an epic seven minutes. Any listener who, by this time, hadn’t totally succumbed to the album’s overbearing feeling of despair, now had no choice but to capitulate (if they hadn’t run screaming from the room already). Smith’s voice was reduced to an agonised whisper, the backing of Tolhurst and Gallup was a heavy-legged crawl. If Faith were a soundtrack, it was the score to the most wrist-slashingly turgid film ever made. But Smith would defend the closing track in subsequent post-mortems on Faith. He firmly believed that, just like the grim last track of their next long-player, Pornography, the song offered a faint flicker of hope, the briefest ray of sunshine in a record that promised very little in the way of good vibrations. It was all relative, of course. According to Smith, ‘Faith’ was “as optimistic as I could get”.

  Throughout Faith, Robert Smith was ruthless with his use of sound and texture to reinforce a mood; he spared the suffering listener absolutely nothing as he unleashed all his pain and suffering and woe while drenching the band’s sound with Gallup’s rumbling bass, Tolhurst’s spare, sparse drumbeats and the occasional wall of synths. Joy Division’s similarly shroud-like wall of pain just didn’t seem so bleak when played back-to-back with Faith. Smith may have cried “there’s nothing left but faith”, as the title track slowly, sadly crept off to its eventual death, but you were left asking how much faith the guy had after such a merciless exercise in bleakness.

  Robert Smith would wear his “Guru of Goth” mantle like some crown of thorns, but he did nothing to dissuade Goth’s true believers with Faith – by directly referring to Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Gothic benchmarks, he was clearly staking out his spot as top Goth on the block. Smith mightn’t have been quite ready to join Ian Curtis in taking that final leap into the unknown, so instead he opted to craft an album so low, so heavy-hearted, that it should have come with a warning about being played to those of a nervous and/or fragile persuasion.

  With the Picture Tour (as the Faith album tour would be known) looming, the band took another unusual tangent regarding their support act. The idea of having local bands submit tapes, and then using a different act in each city they visited, worked reasonably well with their late 1980 tour, but Smith could see its limitations. While he believed that some of the bands hired passed the quality control test, there were other factors that could get in the way of a big night out. “The trouble is,” Smith said, “if we arrive late for a soundcheck or if something goes wrong we’ve got to make a choice – either the support band gets a soundcheck and you get half as long as you need, so your sound’s awful and the audience is disappoin
ted, or the support group doesn’t get a soundcheck and you get a good one and the audience is pissed off all the way through the support act because they can’t hear anything.” The solution was simple: dispense with the support act altogether.

  Smith had a totally new plan. He approached various film schools, pitching the idea for some kind of short film to take the place of an opening act. He also offered to cough up the cash. But the response was collectively cool, so Gallup’s brother Ric was hired. He produced a stark animated piece called Carnage Visors, the title being a dark twist on the term rose-coloured glasses. But the film, which was shot in Gallup’s garage, almost fell apart before its first screening – when he got the film back from the processors, he realised that the light exposures had been incorrectly set and the on-screen result was even darker than the music that The Cure would be playing. Gallup was forced to start from scratch, re-shooting several months of work in a few days.

  The NME’s response to the film, when it eventually debuted on the Picture Tour, was muffled. “It’s not very good,” they reported, “just a series of evolving shapes for people to look at while Smith’s austere soundtrack further imposes the correct conditions of The Cure’s entrance.” (A Google search will reveal, however, that something of a Carnage Visors cult has developed amongst serious Cure-aholics. Several websites are dedicated to Gallup’s unsettling animated short.) The Cure must have learned something from the drawn-out experience of recording Faith, because they cut the accompanying music in record time. On March 16, after a few days of rehearsals, the trio, fuelled by numerous bottles of wine, and ably assisted by a Dr Rhythm drum machine, recorded the 27-minute instrumental soundtrack in a few hours at Point Studios. This recorded version of Carnage Visors would find a home on the flipside of the cassette release of Faith.